Trolling the web for nothing in particular

Yes, Brian, baseball will soon return. I hate the things Major League Baseball does (Bob Costas once likened choosing sides between the players and the owners to choosing sides between Iran and Iraq), but we’ve chosen to stay together for the kids. I’m sure everyone who cares (and some who don’t) can guess what I think of Bud Selig, but I’ll tell you anyway, soon enough.
In the meantime, I look like ArsTechnica today. Oh well. I don’t do this very often.

Blogging. Wired News had its take on the phenomenon, and threw out some interesting stats.

In January alone, at least 41,000 people created new blogs using Blogger, and that number is always increasing, [Blogger founder Evan] Williams said. Some have put the total number of weblogs at more than 500,000.

Alongside the boom, however, there have recently been a few faint signs of backlash. As increasing hordes take on the task of trying to keep new sites looking nice, sounding original and free from banalities, more hordes just seem to fail.

Blog critic Dave Linabury offered a recipe for success:

“It really can take a lot of time,” he said. “I spend two hours a day on my weblog. Many people don’t realize this, they think it’s a quick way to get popular. And after awhile they get really discouraged and say, ‘he got 2,300 hits today, I got four.’ The bulk of people out there get less than two dozen hits.”

“I don’t want to be elitist,” Linabury added, “but all these people out there with popular weblogs, they’ve been doing it longer and they stick to their guns.”

I can attest to that. The people who get more traffic than I get almost all have been doing this longer. But I can tell you one thing: It’s never enough. Back when I was getting 80 visits a day I wanted 150. When I was getting 150 visits a day, I wanted 250. Now that I get about 500 visits a day, I’m awfully distressed to see people are getting 2,300. And by the time I reach 2,300, I’m sure there will be people getting 5,000 or even 10,000. (Note that visits are the number of unique visitors; hits are the number of files served up. Hit count is deceptive. I get 500 visits per day but closer to 1,000 or even 1,500 hits per day, due to people visiting, reading comments, and then often reading something from a previous week. And if they do a search, that’s at least two additional hits.)

Another feather in Internet Explorer’s cap. To my knowledge, no new security vulnerabilities have been reported in Internet Explorer this week, but the newest security patch, released last week, contains a bug that can cause a VBscript directive that previously worked to crash the browser.

Microsoft says Webmasters need to modify their pages not to use the directive.

That’s nice (I don’t use VBscript on this site) but there are embedded devices, such as HP’s JetDirect card, that use the directive. So early adopters of this patch may find themselves unable to do their jobs.

Better webmaster recommendation: Don’t use VBscript or ActiveX or other Microsoft-owned languages in your Web pages at all. Better end-user recommendation: Use Mozilla or a derivative instead of Internet Explorer.

Recompiling Debian for your hardware. This thread comes up every so often, and with the popularity of Linux From Scratch and Gentoo, the appeal of a compiled-from-scratch Debian is undeniable. But does the small speed improvement offset the increased difficulty and time in upgrading?

The consensus seems to be that recompiling gzip, bzip2, and gnupg with aggressive options makes sense, as does recompiling your kernel. Recompiling XFree86 may also make some sense. But expending time and energy in the perfectly optimized versions of ls and more is foolhardy. (Especially seeing as speed demons can just get assembly language versions of them from www.linuxassembly.org.)

A Guide to Debian. This is a guide, still incomplete, that gives a number of tips for someone who’s just installed Debian. The tips are applicable to other many other Linux (and even Unix) flavors as well.

Spam. A coworker walked into my cube today and asked me how he could keep web robots from harvesting e-mail addresses from his web site. I found myself referring once again to the definitive piece on the subject, from Brett Glass (who gets my nomination for the greatest computer columnist of all time, for what that’s worth).

The RULE project. A project has emerged to bring Red Hat Linux back to its roots, and allow it to run on older, less-powerful hardware.

From their site:

This install option is meant to benefit primarily two classes of users:

* GNU/Linux newbies who cannot afford modern computers, but still need, to get started more easily, an up to date, well documented distribution.
* System administrators and power users who have no interest in eye candy, and want to run updated software on whatever hardware is available, to minimize costs, or just because it feels like the right thing to do.

I love their FAQ. Check this out:

1.0 Hardware is so cheap today, why bother?

1. This is a very limited and egoistic attitude. Eigthy per cent of the world population still has to work many months or years to afford a computer that can run decently the majority of modern, apparently “Free” software.
2. Many people who could afford a new computer every two years rightly prefer to buy something else, like vacations, for example…. Hardware should be changed only when it breaks, or when the user’s needs increase a lot (for example when one starts to do video editing). Not because “Free” Software requires more and more expensive hardware every year.

These guys have the right idea. I can only hope their work will influence other Linux distributions as well.

Linux uptime. (Sure, a little original content.) When I was rearranging things months ago, I unplugged the keyboard and monitor from my webserver, then I never got around to plugging them back in because I didn’t have to do anything with it.

The other day, I had occasion to plug a keyboard and mouse back into it. I went in, did what I wanted to do, then out of curiosity I typed the uptime command. 255 days, it told me. In other words, I haven’t rebooted since last May, which, as I recall, was about when I put the machine into production.